“Yes, a cross section. That’s what I saw, at least.”

“Were they happy?”

“How would I know? They looked poor and hungry.”

“Did they cooperate? Did they start fights?”

“Sometimes people would mouth off. Maybe a young punk would try to pull something. If they did, the guards got them back in line real quick. Mostly people were cooperative.”

“Like livestock.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“You mentioned unloading and loading. Sometimes you sent people away. Were they going home?”

“Not usually.”

“Where were they going?”

“Other facilities, usually, as they started more farms. Places like Bartlesville, Joplin, Sugarland, Irving, New Orleans. Sometimes they even got to go back home, with seed licenses, to help start new farms.”

“What was in New Orleans?”

“Camp Zulu, and the Superdome.”

“The Superdome was more like an actual prison.”

“Sort of. It was an emergency detention facility. And the people we sent there were the most dangerous insurgents.”

“So you were told.”

“Sometimes by the insurgents themselves, yeah. But mostly by the Camp Administrator’s Office.”

“So the camp administrator decided who qualified as an insurgent combatant?”

“I don’t know. Could have been they got their lists from the Guard.”

“Were you provided a list?”

“They just brought us the passengers, and names for the manifest.”

“And those passengers had to be sent on more secure buses. With bars on the windows, and bars you could tie their chains to.”

“Yes, we outfitted a prison transport bus for that.”

“So you would load it with prisoners—”

“The guards would load it.”

“So the guards would load it, and take them to New Orleans, to the Superdome, as far as you understood. And then the bus would come back in a day or two?”

“That’s right.”

“Did you get confirmation the passengers had been delivered to their destination?”

Bagley shifted in his chair. “No. Once they boarded, we had done our handoff to AMR and the manifest was closed.”

“But your drivers knew.”

“Those weren’t ‘our drivers.’ They were AMR personnel, with security clearances, working on contract for Motherland.”

“You knew most of them, though, right? You worked with them all the time. Many had been PDL employees before, and toward the end you shared a corporate parent.”

“I knew some of them.”

“Did you ever hear any of them talk about ‘dropping the kids off at the pool’?”

Donny glanced at the judge. She was listening closely, eyes on the witness.

“I can’t remember,” said Bagley.

“You don’t remember anyone talking about what happened to prisoners who left on those buses but never showed up at the Superdome?”

“I heard some stories about that, but only later. After the raids.”

“Were you there when the bus came back on the Friday before Memorial Day four years ago?”

“That was a long time ago.”